The Embedded Librarian

At a conference recently, the fellow sitting next to me referred me to an interesting slide show created by some younger employees of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). (You can see it at http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/214672main_KPainting-GenY_rev11.pdf .)

The authors present characteristics of Generation Y (in U.S. demographics, defined as members of our society born between 1977 and 2000), and make a case that NASA must change its operations and communications in order to connect with this generation as employees and as citizens.

To be clear, the authors have nothing to do with embedded librarianship. But their depiction of Gen Y is so clear and vivid, that as I read it, I couldn’t help thinking that embedded librarianship is well aligned with the nature of Generation Y and the ways our society is changing.

The authors say that Generation Y expects “instant information”, “likes mentors”, is “interdependent”, and is “impatient … but highly adaptable”. They note that Gen Y doesn’t feel a clear boundary between work and life.

They say that the “traditional concept of top-down, one-way communications strategy is dead.”

It seems to me that embedded librarians, with their emphasis on collaboration and relationships, fit this model pretty well. Rather than receiving a question and returning an answer, the embedded librarian shares knowledge, and realizes that the sharing is mutual. Rather than counting transactions, the embedded librarian builds relationships. The embedded librarian doesn’t focus on a traditional, carefully delineated job description, but contributes to the team in whatever ways are needed.

Maybe this is why so many of my students seem to get the idea of embedded librarianship so readily.

I’ve just posted my presentation to the Texas Library Association, entitled “Who Let the Librarians Out? How Digital Content Is Freeing Librarians for New Roles.” It’s available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/DShumaker/who-letthelibrariansouttxla-april2012webversion .

How did I neglect to mention this until now?

Next week, I’ll be participating in the Texas Library Association Conference in Houston.My presentation on “Who Let the Librarians Out? How Digital Content is Freeing Librarians for New Roles” is scheduled for Wednesday, April 18 at 4:00 p.m.

Texans and anyone else at the conference, I hope you’ll be able to attend the program. Please be sure to introduce yourself. I’d love to meet more readers of the blog!

For details on the conference, see www.txla.org . Also, a version of the presentation will be posted afterward. 

If you’re working on embedded librarianship in a corporate or similar specialized setting, you might be interested a new video from The MITRE Corporation.

MITRE has been a leader in information services for many years. (Full disclosure: I retired as Manager of Information Services at MITRE in 2006.)

A new video highlights the role of information services in the corporation. It covers several different aspects of Information Services, including the work of its embedded librarians.

The full video is about 8 1/2 minutes; the segment focusing on embedded librarians starts around 6:30. The url is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg65BL7JMoM .

Enjoy!

The “3 Geeks and a Law” blog has published some results of a recent survey of law firms. It covers the extent of embedded librarianship, duties of embedded librarians, perceived benefits of the embedded model, and more. The survey was conducted by Ark Group.

The results lend strong support to the idea that embedded librarianship is growing rapidly in this sector. It found that over 25% of respondents say they have embedded librarians in their firms. A similar survey I saw a few years ago put the figure at about 10%.

See http://www.geeklawblog.com/2012/03/embedded-librarian-survey-results.html for details.

I used to think that embedded librarianship applied to public libraries only in a kind of indirect or metaphorical way. I couldn’t see how it had much to do with the public library reference desk.

I’m changing my mind.

This change is partly the result of a recent talk radio show appearance, and partly due to some recent initiatives that I’ve learned about thanks to Library Journal.

The radio show was the Kojo Nnamdi show, a talk show on WAMU-FM, a public broadcasting station affiliated with American University here in Washington DC. I was asked to go on the show to discuss the “privatization”, or complete outsourcing of operations of public libraries. The other guests were to be a representative of LSSI, which is the dominant vendor operating fully outsourced public libraries in the U.S., and Patricia Tumulty, executive director of the New Jersey Library Association. Unfortunately, LSSI ended up not participating, so the dialogue I had hoped for didn’t take place. Still it was great to spend 40 minutes discussing librarianship on the public airwaves. If you’d like to listen, or read the transcript, go to http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2012-03-08/outsourcing-public-libraries .

As I was preparing for the broadcast, a recent editorial in Library Journal was very much in my mind. It was “Moving to Outcomes”, from the Jan. 26, 2012 issue. (See http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/01/opinion/editorial/moving-to-outcomes-editorial/) The editorial makes two points. One is that library leaders must evaluate their success in terms of their impacts on the community they serve. The other is that they must collaborate with other community organizations in order to achieve meaningful results — the “collective impact” movement.

These points were reinforced in a webinar held on March 6. Participants offered several examples of community partnerships involving public libraries. These partnerships seem to have some of the key features of embedded librarianship: strong working relationships, specialization, mutual accountability for achieving common goals.

As I reflected on the editorial and the webinar, and tried to define what I really thought about outsourcing public libraries, I realized that initiatives at the District of Columbia Public Library also aligned well with these ideas — specialized services like the Adaptive Services Division, or the Teens of Distinction program. (I’d say more about these programs but this post is getting a bit long. Maybe I’ll return to them in a future post.)

I realized that I had been basing my thinking about embedded librarianship in public libraries upon the operations of the traditional reference desk. I wasn’t taking other activities into account. In fact, public libraries have had limited embedded programs in the past, and if LJ and the webinar participants are right, and the “collective impact” movement grows, we can expect them to have more.

The partnering and sharing ownership of outcomes that will take place will cement the library services to the community and raise perceptions of its value. (And as that happens, I think communities will be less likely to entertain the idea of outsourcing.)

So I’ve changed my mind. The reference desk is just the tip of the iceberg. Public libraries have a lot more going on than that. Public libraries and embedded librarianship have a lot to do with one another.

Every year, the School of Library and Information Science hosts a day-long symposium. We call it the “Bridging the Spectrum” symposium, because we invite librarians working in all sectors to come and present their research and innovative practices. You can find more about the symposium at http://slis.cua.edu/symposium/2012/index.cfm .

This year, we had two posters about embedded librarianship. One was my own, co-presented with my research assistant, Alison Makins. It summarizes the latest findings of the Models of Embedded Librarianship research project, funded by the Special Libraries Association.

The second was presented by one of our students, Trevor Riley. His poster was entitled, “‘Our Librarian’: Embedded Librarianship in Government”. While still a student, Trevor has become a successful and highly valued embedded librarian at a government agency here in the Washington DC area. In the poster, he shares insights based on his experiences, and offers his vision of the opportunities and future for embedded librarianship in the government sector.

I hope you’ll enjoy both posters.

Last but not least, you may also want to watch the video of the symposium keynote address by Maureen Sullivan, President-elect of the American Library Association. Her emphasis on librarians working out of the library, in the community, and in collaboration with others lends strong support (to me, at least) to the idea of embedded librarianship.

I’ve just learned of a workshop on embedded librarianship that will take place in Amherst, Massachusetts, next Monday, Feb. 6, 2012. It’s sponsored by NERCOMP, the New England Regional Computing Program, and organized by Christine Drew and Laura Hanlan of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Details are available at http://www.nercomp.org/index.php?section=events&evtid=120 .

Wish I could attend!

It’s time to catch up on my blogging. Since my last post, I’ve seen 3 interesting items that might interest you too.

First comes the article “Reevaluating the Role of the Research Librarian”, by Rya Ben-Shir and Alexander Feng, which appeared in the September-October 2011 issue of Bio-IT World and on the web at http://www.bio-itworld.com/issues/2011/sept-oct/reevaluating-role-research-librarian.html . The authors make a great case for the value of embedded librarians in the biosciences and pharmaceutical industries, as key contributors to R&D teams. In the article, they tell the story of a company that eliminated its research librarians (presumably as a centralized function) — so the research departments snapped them up as embedded librarians so as not to lose their services. Need we say more!? I love the fact that this article was written for the pharma R&D audience, not librarians. We need more like it!

Next came word that Buffy Hamilton, the Unquiet Librarian (http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com/), will be doing a webinar on embedded librarianship for the American Library Association. It’s entitled “Taking Embedded Librarianship to the Next Level” and will take place on Feb. 22. The description notes that “You create value for your library and your own position within it when you become an instructional partner to faculty and a mentor to student researchers.” Amen!   For more info, see ALA at http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=3663&zbrandid=4634&zidType=CH&zid=9600132&zsubscriberId=1026632089&zbdom=http://ala-publishing.informz.net

Last but not least, today’s email brought a tip to a guest post by Cindy Adams on the “3 Geeks and a Law” blog (http://www.geeklawblog.com/2012/01/law-firm-librarians-out-of-sight-out-of.html) Cindy describes the process of physically embedding librarians in a law firm by moving them out of an isolated central library and into the office areas of the attorneys they are working with. As Cindy says, the librarians “hear what’s going on while visiting the coffee machine or copier. Attorneys stop by their offices, just to visit. By being physically present, we hear what’s going on and have become more proactive in providing research assistance.” Exactly! The comments on this post are also interesting. A few of them cite the problem of librarians losing touch with one another: a legitimate concern, but definitely surmountable, as other commenters point out.

It’s great to see so many varied initiatives in embedded librarianship in such diverse sectors of the profession. What are you up to?

Happy New Year!

To coincide with the start of 2012, the Embedded Librarian blog has a new URL. You’ll now be able to get to it via http://www.embeddedlibrarian.com or just embeddedlibrarian.com.

If you have the old URL bookmarked, no worries. It will still work indefinitely. It will just redirect to the new URL. And if you are trying to remember the URL or tell a colleague about it, now you won’t have to remember which blog hosting service it’s on — embeddedlibrarian.com will bring you here.

I look forward to sharing more news and ideas about embedded librarianship with you in the coming year, and hearing from you as well.

–Dave